Everywhere I turn, I see men being told by society that it isn't okay to be masculine. Personally, I view this as a political and societal objective thrust upon us, in order to create a more fertile filed for controlling the masses by big government and the progressive left. I know that may sound racy or inflammatory, yet it is important to call things by their proper names and so I shall.

I'd like to open a thread to discuss this problem, as it is systemic and needs to be addressed. Discussion can't hurt and I value the thoughts of the people here.

I just fought in my first gathering. I have fought before, but had never walked away from any of my fights with the feeling that others knew what (to me), the true meaning of martial arts are. I walked away from the gathering feeling that finally I had met some men.

Every day, I am constantly bombarded with examples of men being emasculated and it is a far cry from how I was raised. My biological father is a postoperative transsexual, but the father that raised me until I was ten, was a Marine that had served two tours in Viet Nam and if we didn't use the terms Ma'am and Sir, we were immediately clipped in the back of the head for being impolite. That was in rural Iowa and the times were different back then.

These days, if one disciplines a child in this manner, they are immediately at risk of being considered abusive by their neighbors and both local and state authorities. This is only a small part of a systemic problem, as those same authorities will tell the parents that they are responsible for the actions of their children. (This is another great argument against big government, but I'll leave that alone as a separate topic).

Many will tell you that we live in a hyper violent society, with examples given of how the popularity of cage fighting being on the rise, the violence that we are exposed to through movies and videogames, and the violence of the cities across the country, as well as the wars that are going on currently. I contend that men are being emasculated on a widespread basis and that at every turn, people are being told to disarm, not to defend oneself, or at the least, discouraged from doing so i.e., an intruder enters your home and one needs to defend one's actions in a court of law solely for defending property and family.

Welfare is also another way of emasculating men. At any time, when a man is not made to fend for himself for the larger amount of the time (and I understand that people may fall on times and need help. This isn't about those instances), that it cripples him and that he gets used to not performing, because he has found an easier, softer way. The easier softer way never is in the end. It just seems like it.I personally wholeheartedly disagree with both government and society alike, coddling people, making things "alright." It is weakening our entire country one individual at a time.

I have to be up in four hours at 0500, but I would like to discuss this further and see what we can do collectively to abate this situation as it is a problem in my eyes.

You touch upon a theme near and dear to my heart. It has been addressed a bit in threads concerning Gender, Jungian Psychology, and a few others, but I like the idea of it having a thread of its very own.

I agree completely, and this has been going on for quite a while. With each generation, it seems to become more evident. If I can plug another website (I hope that is okay here, if not, please take the link down---I have no affiliation with them): http://artofmanliness.com/. Lots of great articles and a forum (community), but it tends toward the liberal side of things, so I don't spend much time there. Plenty of articles on manhood, old-style shaving, clothing, etc.

Logged

***Look at a man in the midst of doubt and danger, and you will determine in his hour of adversity what he really is***

I agree completely, and this has been going on for quite a while. With each generation, it seems to become more evident. If I can plug another website (I hope that is okay here, if not, please take the link down---I have no affiliation with them): http://artofmanliness.com/. Lots of great articles and a forum (community), but it tends toward the liberal side of things, so I don't spend much time there. Plenty of articles on manhood, old-style shaving, clothing, etc.

Do liberal males actually produce enough testosterone to be able to shave? Or is it more of a anthropological explanation of masculinity for liberals?

I agree completely, and this has been going on for quite a while. With each generation, it seems to become more evident. If I can plug another website (I hope that is okay here, if not, please take the link down---I have no affiliation with them): http://artofmanliness.com/. Lots of great articles and a forum (community), but it tends toward the liberal side of things, so I don't spend much time there. Plenty of articles on manhood, old-style shaving, clothing, etc.

Do liberal males actually produce enough testosterone to be able to shave? Or is it more of a anthropological explanation of masculinity for liberals?

I forget which thread the posts are to be found, but there is a body of scientific literature concerning the presence of certain man-made chemicals in the environment which tend to enter animals, including humans, with feminizing effects , , ,

I get that, but I'm pretty sure there is some substantive stuff about man-made chemicals entering the eco-system and wreaking havoc with reproductive systems (hermaphrodite fish and frogs, less difference between human male and female, etc.)

It is all rather confusing... A female friend sent this to me. (I lost the pictures in cut and paste).

The Question? Male or Female? You might not have known this, but a lot of non-living objects are actually either male or female. Here are some examples:

FREEZER BAGS: They are male, because they hold everything in, but you can see right through them.

PHOTOCOPIERS:These are female, because once turned off; it takes a while to warm them up again. They are an effective reproductive device if the right buttons are pushed, but can also wreak havoc if you push the wrong Buttons.

TIRES: Tires are male, because they go bald easily and are often over inflated

HOT AIR BALLOONS: Also a male object, because to get them to go anywhere, you have to light a fire under their butt.

SPONGES: These are female, because they are soft, squeezable and retain water.

TRAINS: Definitely male, because they always use the same old lines for picking up people..

EGG TIMERS:

Egg timers are female because, over time, all the weight shifts to the bottom.

HAMMERS: Male, because in the last 5000 years, they've hardly changed at all, and are occasionally handy to have around.

THE REMOTECONTROL: Female. Ha! You probably thought it would-be male, but consider this: It easily gives a man pleasure, he'd be lost without it, and while he doesn't always know which buttons to push, he just keeps trying

CLOVIS, Calif. — At 17 years old, Preston Hill is known around the Fresno area as an accomplished wrestler, a leader of his high school team, the Buchanan Bears, and a potential candidate for a college scholarship in the sport he loves.

(Preston Hill, 17, with his mother, Kirsten, and wrestling medals he has won since the fourth grade. He now faces sexual battery charges over a move he used on a teammate in practice.)

But over the past several months, Preston has been battling another opponent, the Fresno County district attorney, who has charged him with a bizarre crime: using a wrestling move to sexually assault a teammate.

According to a police report, during a July practice Preston used a maneuver informally known as a “butt drag” — which involves grabbing the haunch of an opponent to gain leverage — to roughly and intimately assault a smaller, younger wrestler on his team in retaliation for a supposed affront.

Preston has denied attacking the younger boy, who is 14, telling the investigating officer that he was merely executing a common maneuver that “everyone does,” in order to “to motivate people who don’t move on the mats.”

“Hill replied that this was a wrestling move,” according to the police report.

The case, which is expected to go to trial next month, shocked students and parents alike in this Fresno suburb, and brought accusations of both lax supervision by coaches and overzealousness by prosecutors. It has also cast an unwelcome pall on high school wrestling, and again raised questions about bullying in schools, particularly in the often macho arena of sports.

Mike Moyer, the executive director of the National Wrestling Coaches Association, a nonprofit group, said he had been fielding questions about the case, which was first reported by The Fresno Bee. In addition to explaining what a “butt drag” is, he said, he has also been trying to reassure people that the behavior that allegedly happened on the mat is not a regular occurrence.

“There is no sport that is more closely refereed; it would be harder to get away with something in wrestling than any other sport,” he said. “But unfortunately, in contact sports, cheap shots and illegal techniques happen all the time.”

The police in Clovis, a middle-class enclave where wrestling is a proud tradition, say the case began over the summer. The 14-year-old accuser, who has not been identified, told the police that he had been “bullied by several students,” including Preston Hill, who, the younger boy said, had made a habit of taking his drinking water during practice.

On July 15, however, according to the younger boy’s account, he refused to hand his water over, prompting threats from Preston, including menacing gestures. The police report states that at a practice that evening, Preston purposefully stood near the younger boy during a wrestling exercise and, when the coach whistled for wrestling to begin, threw the younger boy down, pinned him to the mat and performed an invasive “butt drag” maneuver.

If convicted of misdemeanor sexual battery, Preston could face six months in county jail. He has been suspended from Buchanan High School, a handsome suburban school that won the state wrestling team championship in 2006. The school district declined to comment on the specifics of the case, citing student confidentiality laws.

This month, a Fresno County judge delayed the trial to allow the district attorney time to gather more evidence, and ordered both sides in the case not to talk about it. But a person close to the Hill family, who requested anonymity because of the order, said there seemed to be a number of inconsistencies in the accuser’s account and a lack of witnesses, a detail borne out by the police report.

The Bee reported that the Fresno County district attorney had considered dropping the case, until prosecutors found a witness to the threat alleged to have been made by Preston. The district attorney did not respond to requests for comment.

But the Hill family representative said Preston, who had hoped to gain a wrestling scholarship, refused to take a deal from the district attorney because he says he did not do anything wrong.

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The 14-year-old accuser’s father, Ross Rice, said it would have been easier not to press charges. “But that’s the wrong attitude,” he said. “That’s when you can end up with a Columbine situation.”

Mr. Rice said that he had nothing against wrestling — he competed in the sport in high school — but that “there needs to be some serious clarity by coaches and the national wresting community on moves that are close to that part of the body.”

Wrestling coaches say that while grabbing the backs of the legs and buttocks during a match could lead to accidental groping, there is no legitimate reason for a wrestler to get as invasive as Preston is accused of being.

“There’s absolutely no advantage in doing that,” said Dennis DeLiddo, a former coach at nearby Fresno State University. “And we don’t want guys like that in the sport anyway, if they’re probing.”

Several classmates of Preston’s at Buchanan High School said the accusation seemed out of character.

“Everyone knows him for being Preston Hill, the wrestler,” said James Munro, a 16-year-old junior. “No one has any problems with him.”

Katy Tudor, a friend of Preston’s and a wrestler, was more blunt. “You have to expect that things are going to happen that you don’t like; you’re going to get hurt,” she said. “If you don’t like it, go play basketball.”

One recent Friday evening, the wrestling season seemed in full swing, with a tournament at a rival high school, Clovis West. Inside the gym, six mats of matches were going on at once, with a constant tweeting of referee’s whistles and a steady array of headlocks, half nelsons and takedowns.

On the Buchanan bench, Coach Tyrell Blanche was animated, rubbing wrestlers’ shoulders and cheering them on. But he has declined to comment on the case, though he may be called to testify at trial. Preston’s defense lawyer, Stephen Quade, told The Bee that he would call several witnesses when court convenes on Jan. 13.

Among those watching the tournament was Mr. DeLiddo, who said the incident had cast his sport in a bad light. “I don’t know the motive behind this, but I’m here to defend the sport,” he said. “That sort of thing has got nothing to do with wrestling.”

"Wrestling coaches say that while grabbing the backs of the legs and buttocks during a match could lead to accidental groping" - That does not sound the same as groping.

A crime during a sport is possible though IMO. I recall a more extreme example. I was at an NHL hockey game watching Boston vs, Minnesota. Boston Bruin star/thug Dave Forbes came out of the penalty box, away from and oblivious to the play, and assaulted opposing player Henry Boucha with his stick and stayed at until there was a pool of blood perhaps 6 feet in diameter, an opponent lying still on the ice and people in our section throwing up at what they witnessed. Boucha of native American origin who rose from Minnesota's iron range hockey and northwest corner up near Canada to play for the USA in the Olympics received an eye injury and never played hockey again. The county attorney, later my attorney, tried to press criminal assault charges that died out with a hung grand jury.

The anger sprang out of a hockey game and the norm in a hockey game is to fight, so if there was any doubt then whatever happened goes with the sport. But if it barks like a duck - an assault, from behind, away from the game, in front of our eyes, inflicting major injury, then it was an assault. Just like Sharia Law and fraternity hazings, hockey customs are not the law of the land.

In the assault you describe, it's sounds reasonable to look at assault charges. Like a lot of cases, it depends on context and severity. Not every schoolyard fight should be adjudicated in court, a no weapons policy should differ between a concealed handgun and a toy soldier's 1/2 inch long rifle.

I was at a birhtday party a few weeks ago, and there was discussion of football and football fans. One of the mothers there said to a early teen girl who had mentioned that she liked football, after the mother had said that she doesn't allow her 10ish year old son to watch, something to the effect of: "That's fine for you. I don't have to worry about you growing up and beating your wife."

MEMO: Christina Hoff Sommers is professor of philosophy at ClarkUniversity. This article, which first appeared in the NationalReview, is adapted from her book ``Who Stole Feminism?'' (Simon &Schuster). In Revolution from Within, Gloria Steinem informed her readersthat "in this country alone . . . about 150,000 females die ofanorexia each year." That is more than three times the annualnumber of auto fatalities. Steinem refers readers to Naomi Wolf'sThe Beauty Myth, where one again finds the statistic, along withthe author's outrage. "How," Wolf asks, "would America react to themass self-immolation by hunger of its favorite sons?" Where did Wolf get her figures? Her source is Fasting Girls: TheEmergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease by Joan Brumberg,former director of women's studies at Cornell University. She, too,is fully aware of the political significance of the startlingstatistic. She points out that the women who study eating problems"seek to demonstrate that these disorders are an inevitableconsequence of a misogynistic society that demeans women . . . byobjectifying their bodies." Brumberg, in turn, attributes thefigure to the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association. I called the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association and spoketo Dr. Diane Mickley, its president. "We were misquoted," she said.In a 1985 newsletter the association had referred to 150,000 to200,000 sufferers (not fatalities) of anorexia nervosa. What is the correct morbidity rate? Most experts are reluctantto give exact figures, but Thomas Dunn of the Division of VitalStatistics at the National Center for Health Statistics reportsthat in 1991 there were 54 deaths from anorexia nervosa and nodeaths from bulimia. The deaths of these young women are a tragedy,certainly, but in a country of 100 million adult females, suchnumbers are hardly evidence of "mass self-immolation." Yet now the false figure, supporting the view that our "sexistsociety" demeans women by objectifying their bodies, is widelyaccepted as true. Will Steinem advise her readers of the egregious statisticalerror? Will it even matter? By now, the 150,000 figure has made itinto college textbooks. The anorexia "crisis" is only one example of the kind ofprovocative but inaccurate information being purveyed by womenabout "women's issues." On Nov. 4, 1992, Deborah Louis, presidentof the National Women's Studies Association, sent a message to theWomen's Studies Electronic Bulletin Board: "According to (the) lastMarch of Dimes report, domestic violence (vs. pregnant women) isnow responsible for more birth defects than all other causescombined. Personally this strikes me as the most disgusting pieceof data I've seen in a long while." This was, indeed, unsettlingnews. But it seemed implausible. I called the March of Dimes to get a copy of the report. Aspokeswoman denied any knowledge of it. I did a search and foundthat - study or no study - journalists around the country wereciting it. I called the March of Dimes again. Andrea Ziltzer of their mediarelations department told me that the rumor was spinning out ofcontrol. When I finally reached Jeanne McDowell, who had written the Timearticle, the first thing she said was, "That was an error." Shesounded genuinely sorry and embarrassed. She explained that she isalways careful about checking sources, but this time, for somereason, she had not. An official retraction finally appeared in themagazine on Dec. 6, 1993. I asked McDowell about her source. She had relied on informationgiven her by the San Francisco Family Violence Prevention Fund,which had obtained it from Sarah Buel, a founder of thedomestic-violence advocacy project at Harvard Law School. She inturn had obtained it from Caroline Whitehead, a maternal nurse andchild-care specialist in Raleigh, N.C. I called Whitehead. "It blows my mind. It is not true," she said. The whole mix-upbegan, she explained, when she introduced Sarah Buel as a speakerat a 1989 conference for nurses and social workers. In presentingher, Whitehead mentioned that according to some March of Dimesresearch she had seen, more women are screened for birth defectsthan are ever screened for domestic battery. Whitehead had saidnothing at all about battery causing birth defects. "Sarahmisunderstood me," she said. I called Buel and told her that it seemed she had misheardCaroline Whitehead. She was surprised. "Oh, I must havemisunderstood her. I'll have to give her a call. She is mysource." She thanked me for having informed her of the error,pointing out that she had been about to repeat it yet again in a newarticle. Why was everybody so credulous? Battery responsible for morebirth defects than all other causes combined? More than geneticdisorders such as spina bifida, Down's syndrome, Tay-Sachs,sickle-cell anemia? More than congenital heart disorders? More thanalcohol, crack or AIDS - more than all these things combined? Wherewere the fact-checkers, the editors, the skeptical journalists? To that question we must add another: Why are certain feministsso eager to put men in a bad light? I shall try to answer boththese questions.American feminism is currently dominated by a group of women whoseek to persuade the public that American women are not the freecreatures we think we are. The leaders and theorists of the women'smovement believe that our society is best described as apatriarchy, a "male hegemony," in which the dominant gender worksto keep women cowering and submissive. Believing that women are virtually under siege, the "genderfeminists" naturally seek recruits to their side of the gender war.They seek support. They seek vindication. tion. They seekammunition. They are constantly on the lookout for the smoking gun, thetelling fact that will drive home how profoundly the system isrigged against women. It is not enough to remind us that manybrutal and selfish men harm women. They must persuade us that thesystem itself sanctions male brutality. Thus gender-feminist ideology holds that physical menace towardwomen is the norm. Gloria Steinem's portrait of male-femaleintimacy under patriarchy is typical: "Patriarchy requires violenceor the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself .. . The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown manin the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or loverin the isolation of their own home." Steinem's description of the dangers women face in their ownhome is reminiscent of the Super Bowl hoax of January 1993. Here isthe chronology: On Jan. 27, a news conference was called in Pasadena, Calif.,site of the forthcoming Super Bowl game, by a coalition of women'sgroups. At the news conference, reporters were informed that SuperBowl Sunday "is the biggest day of the year for violence againstwomen." Forty percent more women would be battered on that day,said Sheila Kuehl of the California Women's Law Center, citing astudy done at Virginia's Old Dominion University. On Jan. 28, Lenore Walker, a Denver psychologist and author ofThe Battered Woman, appeared on Good Morning America claiming tohave compiled a 10-year record showing a sharp increase in violentincidents against women on Super Bowl Sundays. And on Jan. 29, astory in the Boston Globe reported that women's shelter andhotlines are "flooded with more calls from victims (on Super BowlSunday) than on any other day of the year." In this roiling sea of media credulity was a lone island ofprofessional integrity. Ken Ringle, a Washington Post staff writer,took the time to call around. When he asked Janet Katz, professorof sociology and criminal justice at Old Dominion and one of theprincipal authors of the study cited by Kuehl, about the connectionbetween violence and football games, she said: "That's not what wefound at all." Instead, she told him, they had found that anincrease in emergency-room admissions "was not associated with theoccurrence of football games in general." Despite Ringle's expose, however, the Super Bowl "statistic"will be with us for a while, doing its divisive work of generatingfear and resentment. In the book How to Make the World a Better Place for Women inFive Minutes a Day, a comment under the heading "Did You Know?"informs readers that "Super Bowl Sunday is the most violent day ofthe year, with the highest reported number of domestic batteringcases." How a belief in that misandrist canard can make the world abetter place for women is not explained.

By LENORE SKENAZY Last week, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Timothy Murray, noticed smoke coming out of a minivan in his hometown of Worcester. He raced over and pulled out two small children, moments before the van's tire exploded into flames. At which point, according to the AP account, the kids' grandmother, who had been driving, nearly punched our hero in the face.

Why?

Mr. Murray said she told him she thought he might be a kidnapper.

And so it goes these days, when almost any man who has anything to do with a child can find himself suspected of being a creep. I call it "Worst-First" thinking: Gripped by pedophile panic, we jump to the very worst, even least likely, conclusion first. Then we congratulate ourselves for being so vigilant.

Consider the Iowa daycare center where Nichole Adkins works. The one male aide employed there, she told me in an interview, is not allowed to change diapers. "In fact," Ms. Adkins said, "he has been asked to leave the classroom when diapering was happening."

Now, a guy turned on by diaper changes has got to be even rarer than a guy turned on by Sponge Bob. But "Worst-First" thinking means suspecting the motives of any man who chooses to work around kids.

Maybe the daycare center felt it had to be extra cautious, to avoid lawsuits. But regular folk are suspicious, too. Last February, a woman followed a man around at a store berating him for clutching a pile of girls' panties. "I can't believe this! You're disgusting. This is a public place, you pervert!" she said—until the guy, who posted about the episode on a website, fished out his ID. He was a clerk restocking the underwear department.

Given the level of distrust, is it any wonder that, as the London Telegraph reported last month, the British Musicians' Union warned its members they are no longer to touch a child's fingers, even to position them correctly on the keys? Or that a public pool in Sydney, Australia last fall prohibited boys from changing in the same locker room as the men? (According to the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, the men demanded this, fearing false accusations.)

What's really ironic about all this emphasis on perverts is that it's making us think like them. Remember the story that broke right before Christmas? The FBI warned law-enforcement agencies that the new Video Barbie could be used to make kiddie porn. The warning was not intended for the public but it leaked out. TV news celebrated the joy of the season by telling parents that any man nice enough to play dolls with their daughters could really be videotaping "under their little skirts!" as one Fox News reporter said.

This queasy climate is making men think twice about things they used to do unselfconsciously. A friend of mine, Eric Kozak, was working for a while as a courier. Driving around an unfamiliar neighborhood, he says, "I got lost. I saw a couple kids by the side of the road and rolled down my window to ask, 'Where is such-and-such road?' They ran off screaming."

Another dad told me about taking his three-year-old to play football in the local park, where he'd help organize the slightly older kids into a game. Over time, one of the kids started to look up to him. "He wanted to stand close to me, wanted approval, Dad stuff, I guess. And because of this whole 'stranger danger' mentality, I could sense this sort of wary disapproval from the few other parents at the playground. So I just stopped going."

And that's not the worst. In England in 2006, BBC News reported the story of a bricklayer who spotted a toddler at the side of the road. As he later testified at a hearing, he didn't stop to help for fear he'd be accused of trying to abduct her. You know: A man driving around with a little girl in his car? She ended up at a pond and drowned.

We think we're protecting our kids by treating all men as potential predators. But that's not a society that's safe. Just sick.

Ms. Skenazy is a public speaker and author of the blog and book, "Free-Range Kids" (Wiley, 2010).

I had an interesting conversation today; with a person that is, shall I say, much more liberal than I am.

It was in regard to a female friend that has an extremely abusive ex-boyfriend that contacted her recently and I am counseling her to get firearm and self defense training (sound advice IMO).

Her friend was a bit distraught and in the ensuing conversation, I admit being callous, but truthfull.

When even the need to defend one's family, against the heinous acts committed by those currently serving on death row, this individual still argues against firearm training and ownership; citing a statistic that "homes that have a firearm are 2-10 times more likely to have a suicide occur in them" and had more bans been enacted, effectively curtailing the rights afforded by the 2nd amendment, that last week's tragedy in Arizona would have "likely" been prevented.

You all know my stance on firearm ownership and this is not me going on a rail against Liberal philosophy.

I suppose that I am making an observation that when, a person's family could be conceivably hurt, killed, and I went as far as to suggest even "raped" (I know that it is graphic, but the people on death row aren't there for being nice), why any one would argue against being able to defend one's family effectively and efficiently. When we know that criminals are going to carry firearms in spite of what the law says, wouldn't it be prudent to argue in defense of an effective means of protection?

I have all the respect in the world for the police, but we are all personally our own first line of defense. I'm having a hard time trying to figure out why progressive men are arguing against what has been our calling since the beginning of our existence and doing so by quoting unsubstantiated statistics, and at the risk of their own personall safety and the safety or their loved ones.

I am very much a "root cause" type of person and I am certain that one does not develop this mindset overnight, especially when it is so directly in contrast to that which nature has set forward in the psyche of nearly every male species on the planet. I am curious as to how this transformation began, who started it, why, and more importantly, how to stop it.

It is important that this behavior is curved because to me, the majority of the society, is going to determine the rules in which we live. If we have more and more people turning to a philosophy that neglects individual responsibility and self sufficiency, in several areas, especially the important ones of one's own survival and independence, what will we as a country become?

There are several ways that this topic could go, but to me; a follower of Taoist philosophy, not religion and not necessarily peaceful, I do believe that either Nature or God were correct in designing us and that any time we attempt to deviate from the design that has been proven through evolution or millennia, we only await to discover our folly.

I do know that in Russia, the children's books, had pictures of the German soldiers being shot and referred to as bad. This is being read at age 5. The same thing is happening here, but with a different result in mind.

An instructor at Front Sight has a very sad story about a young nurse being stalked by an ex, that was counseled by her co-workers not to get a gun, but get a whistle instead. She died blowing the whistle in the parking lot of the hospital, as she was stabbed multiple times with a screwdriver. The whistle stopped working during the assault, as it was so clogged with her blood.

An instructor at Front Sight has a very sad story about a young nurse being stalked by an ex, that was counseled by her coworkers not to get a gun, but get a whistle instead. She died blowing the whistle in the parking lot of the hospital, as she was stabbed multiple times with a screwdriver. The whistle stopped working during the assault, as it was so clogged with her blood.

I can't do anything but shake my head. What in the hell do you say something like that?

I would love to hear what her coworker's stances are on that now. I'd love to hear what they teach their children.

Some things just really tick me off. Primarily stupidity, inefficiency, and lack of self sufficiency when it is unwarranted. SMH

This story also speaks to the failure of the legal system to protect someone like her who is being stalked.Yeah she could get a restraining order but that is not going to stop a determined guy like this.

You won't hear Spitzer telling this story while he rants about gun control.

This is from SI, and Phil Taylor is discussing the most recent voting from the Baseball Hall of Fame. I like this entire article, but the qutoes below are what stood out to me the most, and why I posted here:

Q | Doesn't that mean that some players with excellent stats will be kept out?

A | It does, and there's nothing wrong with that. The Gatekeeper believes the Hall of Fame has too many members as it is. In fact, don't get the Gatekeeper started, because he'll talk your ear off about how it's all part of the misguided tendency in sports to relax the standards of excellence. We don't just lock onto outdated milestones, like 500 home runs, we consider anyone who gets in the neighborhood, causing the bar to fall increasingly lower. The problem isn't limited to the Hall. Some people want to double the number of teams in the NCAA men's basketball tournament—or even worse, let everyone in. Loosening the definition of excellence is why we have expanded playoffs and expanded All-Star rosters. Does everything have to be devalued, diluted? The Gatekeeper wants a Hall that's harder to get into than his old high school jersey.

Q | Isn't it unfair to keep deserving players out when they don't meet subjective criteria?

A | Define deserving. The Gatekeeper believes that no one deserves enshrinement in Cooperstown. Induction is a privilege, and it's perfectly reasonable to put emotion into the analysis. Noted baseball thinker Bob Costas has said that the Hall should be limited to the immortals. The Gatekeeper couldn't agree more. How do we get such a Hall? By asking questions that can't be answered with a calculator. Did the player take your breath away? Is he someone to tell your grandchildren about? The Gatekeeper evaluates an artist by how a painting makes him feel, not by the number of brushstrokes per canvas.

Not so long ago, the average American man in his 20s had achieved most of the milestones of adulthood: a high-school diploma, financial independence, marriage and children. Today, most men in their 20s hang out in a novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. This "pre-adulthood" has much to recommend it, especially for the college-educated. But it's time to state what has become obvious to legions of frustrated young women: It doesn't bring out the best in men.

Between his lack of responsibilities and an entertainment media devoted to his every pleasure, today's young man has no reason to grow up, says author Kay Hymowitz. She discusses her book, "Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys."."We are sick of hooking up with guys," writes the comedian Julie Klausner, author of a touchingly funny 2010 book, "I Don't Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux-Sensitive Hipsters and Other Guys I've Dated." What Ms. Klausner means by "guys" is males who are not boys or men but something in between. "Guys talk about 'Star Wars' like it's not a movie made for people half their age; a guy's idea of a perfect night is a hang around the PlayStation with his bandmates, or a trip to Vegas with his college friends.... They are more like the kids we babysat than the dads who drove us home." One female reviewer of Ms. Kausner's book wrote, "I had to stop several times while reading and think: Wait, did I date this same guy?"

For most of us, the cultural habitat of pre-adulthood no longer seems noteworthy. After all, popular culture has been crowded with pre-adults for almost two decades. Hollywood started the affair in the early 1990s with movies like "Singles," "Reality Bites," "Single White Female" and "Swingers." Television soon deepened the relationship, giving us the agreeable company of Monica, Joey, Rachel and Ross; Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer; Carrie, Miranda, et al.

But for all its familiarity, pre-adulthood represents a momentous sociological development. It's no exaggeration to say that having large numbers of single young men and women living independently, while also having enough disposable income to avoid ever messing up their kitchens, is something entirely new in human experience. Yes, at other points in Western history young people have waited well into their 20s to marry, and yes, office girls and bachelor lawyers have been working and finding amusement in cities for more than a century. But their numbers and their money supply were always relatively small. Today's pre-adults are a different matter. They are a major demographic event.

View Full Image.What also makes pre-adulthood something new is its radical reversal of the sexual hierarchy. Among pre-adults, women are the first sex. They graduate from college in greater numbers (among Americans ages 25 to 34, 34% of women now have a bachelor's degree but just 27% of men), and they have higher GPAs. As most professors tell it, they also have more confidence and drive. These strengths carry women through their 20s, when they are more likely than men to be in grad school and making strides in the workplace. In a number of cities, they are even out-earning their brothers and boyfriends.

Still, for these women, one key question won't go away: Where have the good men gone? Their male peers often come across as aging frat boys, maladroit geeks or grubby slackers—a gender gap neatly crystallized by the director Judd Apatow in his hit 2007 movie "Knocked Up." The story's hero is 23-year-old Ben Stone (Seth Rogen), who has a drunken fling with Allison Scott (Katherine Heigl) and gets her pregnant. Ben lives in a Los Angeles crash pad with a group of grubby friends who spend their days playing videogames, smoking pot and unsuccessfully planning to launch a porn website. Allison, by contrast, is on her way up as a television reporter and lives in a neatly kept apartment with what appear to be clean sheets and towels. Once she decides to have the baby, she figures out what needs to be done and does it. Ben can only stumble his way toward being a responsible grownup.

So where did these pre-adults come from? You might assume that their appearance is a result of spoiled 24-year-olds trying to prolong the campus drinking and hook-up scene while exploiting the largesse of mom and dad. But the causes run deeper than that. Beginning in the 1980s, the economic advantage of higher education—the "college premium"—began to increase dramatically. Between 1960 and 2000, the percentage of younger adults enrolled in college or graduate school more than doubled. In the "knowledge economy," good jobs go to those with degrees. And degrees take years.

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WHY GROW UP? Men in their 20s now have an array of toys and distractions at their disposal, from videogames and sports bars to 'lad' magazines like Maxim, which makes Playboy look like Camus..Read MoreTwo Cheers for the Maligned Slacker Dude .Another factor in the lengthening of the road to adulthood is our increasingly labyrinthine labor market. The past decades' economic expansion and the digital revolution have transformed the high-end labor market into a fierce competition for the most stimulating, creative and glamorous jobs. Fields that attract ambitious young men and women often require years of moving between school and internships, between internships and jobs, laterally and horizontally between jobs, and between cities in the U.S. and abroad. The knowledge economy gives the educated young an unprecedented opportunity to think about work in personal terms. They are looking not just for jobs but for "careers," work in which they can exercise their talents and express their deepest passions. They expect their careers to give shape to their identity. For today's pre-adults, "what you do" is almost synonymous with "who you are," and starting a family is seldom part of the picture.

Pre-adulthood can be compared to adolescence, an idea invented in the mid-20th century as American teenagers were herded away from the fields and the workplace and into that new institution, the high school. For a long time, the poor and recent immigrants were not part of adolescent life; they went straight to work, since their families couldn't afford the lost labor and income. But the country had grown rich enough to carve out space and time to create a more highly educated citizenry and work force. Teenagers quickly became a marketing and cultural phenomenon. They also earned their own psychological profile. One of the most influential of the psychologists of adolescence was Erik Erikson, who described the stage as a "moratorium," a limbo between childhood and adulthood characterized by role confusion, emotional turmoil and identity conflict.

Like adolescents in the 20th century, today's pre-adults have been wait-listed for adulthood. Marketers and culture creators help to promote pre-adulthood as a lifestyle. And like adolescence, pre-adulthood is a class-based social phenomenon, reserved for the relatively well-to-do. Those who don't get a four-year college degree are not in a position to compete for the more satisfying jobs of the knowledge economy.

But pre-adults differ in one major respect from adolescents. They write their own biographies, and they do it from scratch. Sociologists use the term "life script" to describe a particular society's ordering of life's large events and stages. Though such scripts vary across cultures, the archetypal plot is deeply rooted in our biological nature. The invention of adolescence did not change the large Roman numerals of the American script. Adults continued to be those who took over the primary tasks of the economy and culture. For women, the central task usually involved the day-to-day rearing of the next generation; for men, it involved protecting and providing for their wives and children. If you followed the script, you became an adult, a temporary custodian of the social order until your own old age and demise.

Unlike adolescents, however, pre-adults don't know what is supposed to come next. For them, marriage and parenthood come in many forms, or can be skipped altogether. In 1970, just 16% of Americans ages 25 to 29 had never been married; today that's true of an astonishing 55% of the age group. In the U.S., the mean age at first marriage has been climbing toward 30 (a point past which it has already gone in much of Europe). It is no wonder that so many young Americans suffer through a "quarter-life crisis," a period of depression and worry over their future.

Given the rigors of contemporary career-building, pre-adults who do marry and start families do so later than ever before in human history. Husbands, wives and children are a drag on the footloose life required for the early career track and identity search. Pre-adulthood has also confounded the primordial search for a mate. It has delayed a stable sense of identity, dramatically expanded the pool of possible spouses, mystified courtship routines and helped to throw into doubt the very meaning of marriage. In 1970, to cite just one of many numbers proving the point, nearly seven in 10 25-year-olds were married; by 2000, only one-third had reached that milestone.

American men have been struggling with finding an acceptable adult identity since at least the mid-19th century. We often hear about the miseries of women confined to the domestic sphere once men began to work in offices and factories away from home. But it seems that men didn't much like the arrangement either. They balked at the stuffy propriety of the bourgeois parlor, as they did later at the banal activities of the suburban living room. They turned to hobbies and adventures, like hunting and fishing. At midcentury, fathers who at first had refused to put down the money to buy those newfangled televisions changed their minds when the networks began broadcasting boxing matches and baseball games. The arrival of Playboy in the 1950s seemed like the ultimate protest against male domestication; think of the refusal implied by the magazine's title alone.

In his disregard for domestic life, the playboy was prologue for today's pre-adult male. Unlike the playboy with his jazz and art-filled pad, however, our boy rebel is a creature of the animal house. In the 1990s, Maxim, the rude, lewd and hugely popular "lad" magazine arrived from England. Its philosophy and tone were so juvenile, so entirely undomesticated, that it made Playboy look like Camus.

At the same time, young men were tuning in to cable channels like Comedy Central, the Cartoon Network and Spike, whose shows reflected the adolescent male preferences of its targeted male audiences. They watched movies with overgrown boy actors like Steve Carell, Luke and Owen Wilson, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Will Farrell and Seth Rogen, cheering their awesome car crashes, fart jokes, breast and crotch shots, beer pong competitions and other frat-boy pranks. Americans had always struck foreigners as youthful, even childlike, in their energy and optimism. But this was too much.

What explains this puerile shallowness? I see it as an expression of our cultural uncertainty about the social role of men. It's been an almost universal rule of civilization that girls became women simply by reaching physical maturity, but boys had to pass a test. They needed to demonstrate courage, physical prowess or mastery of the necessary skills. The goal was to prove their competence as protectors and providers. Today, however, with women moving ahead in our advanced economy, husbands and fathers are now optional, and the qualities of character men once needed to play their roles—fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity—are obsolete, even a little embarrassing.

Today's pre-adult male is like an actor in a drama in which he only knows what he shouldn't say. He has to compete in a fierce job market, but he can't act too bossy or self-confident. He should be sensitive but not paternalistic, smart but not cocky. To deepen his predicament, because he is single, his advisers and confidants are generally undomesticated guys just like him.

Single men have never been civilization's most responsible actors; they continue to be more troubled and less successful than men who deliberately choose to become husbands and fathers. So we can be disgusted if some of them continue to live in rooms decorated with "Star Wars" posters and crushed beer cans and to treat women like disposable estrogen toys, but we shouldn't be surprised.

Relatively affluent, free of family responsibilities, and entertained by an array of media devoted to his every pleasure, the single young man can live in pig heaven—and often does. Women put up with him for a while, but then in fear and disgust either give up on any idea of a husband and kids or just go to a sperm bank and get the DNA without the troublesome man. But these rational choices on the part of women only serve to legitimize men's attachment to the sand box. Why should they grow up? No one needs them anyway. There's nothing they have to do.

West: The Fatherless CivilizationBy Fjordman The decade from the first half of the 1960s to the first half of the 1970s was clearly a major watershed in Western history, with the start of non-Western mass immigration in the USA, the birth of Eurabia in Western Europe and the rise of Multiculturalism and radical Feminism. American columnist Diana West recently released her book The Death of the Grown-up, where she traces the decline of Western civilization to the permanent youth rebellions of the past two generations. The paradox is that the people who viciously attacked their own civilization had enjoyed uninterrupted economic growth for decades, yet embraced Marxist-inspired ideologies and decided to undermine the very society which had allowed them to live privileged lives. Maybe this isn't as strange as it seems. Karl Marx himself was aided by the wealth of Friedrich Engels, the son of a successful industrialist.

This was also the age of decolonization in Western Europe and desegregation in the USA, which created an atmosphere where Western civilization was seen as evil. Whatever the cause, we have since been stuck in a pattern of eternal opposition to our own civilization. Some of these problems may well have older roots, but they became institutionalized to an unprecedented degree during the 1960s.

According to Diana West, the organizing thesis of her book "is that the unprecedented transfer of cultural authority from adults to adolescents over the past half century or so has dire implications for the survival of the Western world." Having redirected our natural development away from adulthood and maturity in order to strike the pop-influenced pose of eternally cool youth – ever-open, non-judgmental, self-absorbed, searching for (or just plain lacking) identity – we have fostered a society marked by these same traits. In short: Westerners live in a state of perpetual adolescence, but also with a corresponding perpetual identity crisis. West thinks maturity went out of style in the rebellious 1960s, "the biggest temper tantrum in the history of the world," which flouted authority figures of any kind.

She also believes that although the most radical break with the past took place during the 60s and 70s, the roots of Western youth culture are to be found in the 1950s with the birth of rock and roll music, Elvis Presley and actors such as James Dean. Pop group The Beatles embodied this in the early 60s, but changed radically in favor of drugs and the rejection of established wisdom as they approached 1970, a shift which was reflected in the entire culture.

Personally, one of my favorite movies from the 1980s was Back to the Future. In one of the scenes, actor Michael J. Fox travels in time from 1985 to 1955. Before he leaves 1985, he hears the slogan "Re-elect Mayor....Progress is his middle name." The same slogan is repeated in 1955, only with a different name. Politics is politics in any age. Writers Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale have stated that they chose the year 1955 as the setting of the movie because this was the age of the birth of teen culture: This was when the teenager started to rule, and he has ruled ever since.

As West says, many things changed in the economic boom in the decades following the Second World War: "When you talk about the postwar period, the vast new affluence is a big factor in reorienting the culture to adolescent desire. You see a shift in cultural authority going to the young. Instead of kids who might take a job to be able to help with household expenses, all of a sudden that pocket money was going into the manufacture of a massive new culture. That conferred such importance to a period of adolescence that had never been there before." After generations of this celebration of youth, the adults have no confidence left: "Kids are planning expensive trips, going out unchaperoned, they are drinking, debauching, absolutely running amok, yet the parents say, 'I can't do anything about it.' Parents have abdicated responsibilities to give in to adolescent desire."

She believes that "Where womanhood stands today is deeply affected by the death of grown-up. I would say the sexualized female is part of the phenomenon I'm talking about, so I don't think they're immune to the death of the grown-up. Women are still emulating young fashion. Where sex is more available, there are no longer the same incentives building toward married life, which once was a big motivation toward the maturing process."

Is she right? Have we become a civilization of Peter Pans refusing to grow up? Have we been cut off from the past by disparaging everything old as outmoded? I know blogger Conservative Swede, who likes Friedrich Nietzsche, thinks we suffer from "slave morality," but I sometimes wonder whether we suffer from child morality rather than slave morality. However, there are other forces at work here as well.

The welfare state encourages an infantilization of society where people return to childhood by being provided for by others. This creates not just a culture obsessed with youth but with adolescent irresponsibility. Many people live in a constant state of rebellion against not just their parents but their nation, their culture and their civilization.

Writer Theodore Dalrymple thinks one reason for the epidemic of self-destructiveness in Western societies is the avoidance of boredom: "For people who have no transcendent purpose to their lives and cannot invent one through contributing to a cultural tradition (for example), in other words who have no religious belief and no intellectual interests to stimulate them, self-destruction and the creation of crises in their life is one way of warding off meaninglessness."

According to him, what we are seeing now is "a society in which people demand to behave more or less as they wish, that is to say whimsically, in accordance with their kaleidoscopically changing desires, at the same time as being protected from the natural consequences of their own behaviour by agencies of the state. The result is a combination of Sodom and Gomorrah and a vast and impersonal bureaucracy of welfare."

The welfare state deprives you of the possibility of deriving self-respect from your work. This can hurt a person's self-respect, but more so for men than for women because masculine identity is closely tied to providing for others. Stripped of this, male self-respect declines and society with it. Dalrymple also worries about the end of fatherhood, and believes that the worst child abusers are governments promoting the very circumstances in which child abuse and neglect are most likely to take place: "He who promotes single parenthood is indifferent to the fate of children." Fatherhood scarcely exists, except in the merest biological sense:

"I worked in a hospital in which had it not been for the children of Indian immigrants, the illegitimacy rate of children born there would have approached one hundred per cent. It became an almost indelicate question to ask of a young person who his or her father was; to me, it was still an astounding thing to be asked, 'Do you mean my father now, at the moment?' as if it could change at any time and had in fact changed several times before."

This is because "women are to have children merely because they want them, as is their government-given right, irrespective of their ability to bring them up, or who has to pay for them, or the consequences to the children themselves. Men are to be permanently infantilised, their income being in essence pocket money for them to spend on their enjoyments, having no serious responsibilities at all (beyond paying tax). Henceforth, the state will be father to the child, and the father will be child of the state."

As Swedish writer Per Bylund explains: "Most of us were not raised by our parents at all. We were raised by the authorities in state daycare centers from the time of infancy; then pushed on to public schools, public high schools, and public universities; and later to employment in the public sector and more education via the powerful labor unions and their educational associations. The state is ever-present and is to many the only means of survival – and its welfare benefits the only possible way to gain independence."

Though Sweden is arguably an extreme case, author Melanie Phillips notices the same trends in Britain, too: "Our culture is now deep into uncharted territory. Generations of family disintegration in turn are unravelling the fundamentals of civilised human behaviour. Committed fathers are crucial to their children's emotional development. As a result of the incalculable irresponsibility of our elites, however, fathers have been seen for the past three decades as expendable and disposable. Lone parenthood stopped being a source of shame and turned instead into a woman's inalienable right. The state has provided more and more inducements to women – through child benefit, council flats and other welfare provision – to have children without committed fathers. This has produced generations of women-only households, where emotionally needy girls so often become hopelessly inadequate mothers who abuse and neglect their own children – who, in turn, perpetuate the destructive pattern. This is culturally nothing less than suicidal."

I sometimes wonder whether the modern West, and Western Europe in particular, should be dubbed the Fatherless Civilization. Fathers have been turned into a caricature and there is a striking demonization of traditional male values. Any person attempting to enforce rules and authority, a traditional male preserve, is seen as a Fascist and ridiculed, starting with God the Father. We end up with a society of vague fathers who can be replaced at the whim of the mothers at any given moment. Even the mothers have largely abdicated, leaving the upbringing of children to schools, kindergartens and television. In fashion and lifestyle, mothers imitate their daughters, not vice versa.

The elaborate welfare state model in Western Europe is frequently labelled "the nanny state," but perhaps it could also be named "the husband state." Why? Well, in a traditional society, the role of men was to physically protect and financially provide for their women. In our modern society, part of this task has been "outsourced" to the state, which helps explain why women in general give disproportionate support to high taxation and pro-welfare state parties. According to anthropologist Lionel Tiger, the ancient unit of a mother, a child and a father has morphed from monogamy into "bureaugamy," a mother, a child and a bureaucrat. The state has become a substitute husband. In fact, it doesn't replace just the husband, it replaces the entire nuclear and extended family, raises the children and cares for the elderly.

Øystein Djupedal, Minister of Education and Research from the Socialist Left Party and responsible for Norwegian education from kindergartens via high schools to PhD level, has stated: "I think that it's simply a mistaken view of child-rearing to believe that parents are the best to raise children. 'Children need a village,' said Hillary Clinton. But we don't have that. The village of our time is the kindergarten." He later retracted this statement, saying that parents have the main responsibility for raising children, but that "kindergartens are a fantastic device for children, and it is good for children to spend time in kindergarten before [they] start school."

The problem is that some of his colleagues use the kindergarten as the blueprint for society as a whole, even for adults. In the fall of 2007, Norway's center-left government issued a warning to 140 companies that still hadn't fulfilled the state-mandated quota of 40 percent women on their boards of directors. Equality minister Karita Bekkemellem stated that companies failing to meet the quota will face involuntary dissolution, despite the fact that many are within traditionally male-oriented branches like the offshore oil industry, shipping and finance. She called the law "historic and radical" and said it will be enforced.

Bekkemellem is thus punishing the naughty children who refuse to do as Mother State tells them to, even if these children happen to be private corporations. The state replaces the father in the sense that it provides for you financially, but it acts more like a mother in removing risks and turning society into a cozy, regulated kindergarten with ice cream and speech codes.

Blog reader Tim W. thinks women tend to be more selfish than men vis-a-vis the opposite sex: "Men show concern for women and children while women.... well, they show concern for themselves and children. I'm not saying that individual women don't show concern for husbands or brothers, but as a group (or voting bloc) they have no particular interest in men's well-being. Women's problems are always a major concern but men's problems aren't. Every political candidate is expected to address women's concerns, but a candidate even acknowledging that men might have concerns worth addressing would be ostracized." What if men lived an average of five years and eight months longer than women? Well, if that were the case, we'd never hear the end of it: "Feminists and women candidates would walk around wearing buttons with 'five years, eight months' written on them to constantly remind themselves and the world about this horrendous inequity. That this would happen, and surely it would, says something about the differing natures of male and female voters."

Bernard Chapin interviewed Dr. John Lott at Frontpage Magazine. According to Lott, "I think that women are generally more risk averse then men are and they see government as one way of providing insurance against life's vagaries. I also think that divorced women with kids particularly turn towards government for protection. Simply giving women the right to vote explained at least a third of the growth in government for about 45 years."

He thinks this "explains a lot of the government's growth in the US but also the rest of the world over the last century. When states gave women the right to vote, government spending and tax revenue, even after adjusting for inflation and population, went from not growing at all to more than doubling in ten years. As women gradually made up a greater and greater share of the electorate, the size of government kept on increasing. This continued for 45 years as a lot of older women who hadn't been used to voting when suffrage first passed were gradually replaced by younger women. After you get to the 1960s, the continued growth in government is driven by higher divorce rates. Divorce causes women with children to turn much more to government programs." The liberalization of abortion also led to more single parent families.

Diana West thinks what we saw in the counterculture of the 1960s was a leveling of all sorts of hierarchies, both of learning and of authority. From that emerged the leveling of culture and by extension Multiculturalism. She also links this trend to the nanny state:

"In considering the strong links between an increasingly paternalistic nanny state and the death of the grown-up, I found that Tocqueville (of course) had long ago made the connections. He tried to imagine under what conditions despotism could come to the United States. He came up with a vision of the nation characterized, on the one hand, by an 'innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal, constantly circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls,' and, on the other, by the 'immense protective power' of the state. 'Banal pleasures' and 'immense state power' might have sounded downright science-fictional in the middle of the 19th century; by the start of the 21st century, it begins to sound all too familiar. Indeed, speaking of the all-powerful state, he wrote: 'It would resemble parental authority if, fatherlike, it tried to prepare its charges for a man's life, but, on the contrary, it only tries to keep them in perpetual childhood.' Perhaps the extent to which we, liberals and conservatives alike, have acquiesced to our state's parental authority shows how far along we, as a culture, have reached Tocqueville's state of 'perpetual childhood.'"

This problem is even worse in Western Europe, a region with more elaborate welfare states than the USA and which has lived under the American military umbrella for generations, thus further enhancing the tendency for adolescent behavior.

The question, which was indirectly raised by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s in his book Democracy in America, is this: If democracy of universal suffrage means that everybody's opinion is as good as everybody else's, will this sooner or later turn into a society where everybody's choices are also as good as everybody else's, which leads to cultural relativism? Tocqueville wrote at a time when only men had the vote. Will universal suffrage also lead to a situation where women vote themselves into possession of men's finances while reducing their authority and creating powerful state regulation of everything?

I don't know the answer to that. What I do know is that the current situation isn't sustainable. The absence of fatherhood has created a society full of social pathologies, and the lack of male self-confidence has made us easy prey for our enemies. If the West is to survive, we need to reassert a healthy dose of male authority. In order to do so we need to roll back the welfare state. Perhaps we need to roll back some of the excesses of Western Feminism, too.

Fjordman is a noted Norwegian blogger who has written for many conservative web sites. He used to have his own Fjordman Blog in the past, but it is no longer active.

You’re probably aware of the basic trends. The financial rewards to education have increased over the past few decades, but men failed to get the memo. In elementary and high school, male academic performance is lagging. Boys earn three-quarters of the D’s and F’s. By college, men are clearly behind. Only 40 percent of bachelor’s degrees go to men, along with 40 percent of master’s degrees.

Thanks to their lower skills, men are dropping out of the labor force. In 1954, 96 percent of the American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. Today, that number is down to 80 percent. In Friday’s jobs report, male labor force participation reached an all-time low.

Millions of men are collecting disability. Even many of those who do have a job are doing poorly. According to Michael Greenstone of the Hamilton Project, annual earnings for median prime-age males have dropped by 28 percent over the past 40 years.

Men still dominate the tippy-top of the corporate ladder because many women take time off to raise children, but women lead or are gaining nearly everywhere else. Women in their 20s outearn men in their 20s. Twelve out of the 15 fastest-growing professions are dominated by women.

Over the years, many of us have embraced a certain theory to explain men’s economic decline. It is that the information-age economy rewards traits that, for neurological and cultural reasons, women are more likely to possess.

To succeed today, you have to be able to sit still and focus attention in school at an early age. You have to be emotionally sensitive and aware of context. You have to communicate smoothly. For genetic and cultural reasons, many men stink at these tasks.

But, in her fascinating new book, “The End of Men,” Hanna Rosin posits a different theory. It has to do with adaptability. Women, Rosin argues, are like immigrants who have moved to a new country. They see a new social context, and they flexibly adapt to new circumstances. Men are like immigrants who have physically moved to a new country but who have kept their minds in the old one. They speak the old language. They follow the old mores. Men are more likely to be rigid; women are more fluid.

This theory has less to do with innate traits and more to do with social position. When there’s big social change, the people who were on the top of the old order are bound to cling to the old ways. The people who were on the bottom are bound to experience a burst of energy. They’re going to explore their new surroundings more enthusiastically.

Rosin reports from working-class Alabama. The women she meets are flooding into new jobs and new opportunities — going back to college, pursuing new careers. The men are waiting around for the jobs that left and are never coming back. They are strangely immune to new options. In the Auburn-Opelika region, the median female income is 140 percent of the median male income.

Rosin also reports from college campuses where women are pioneering new social arrangements. The usual story is that men are exploiting the new campus hookup culture in order to get plenty of sex without romantic commitments. Rosin argues that, in fact, women support the hookup culture. It allows them to have sex and fun without any time-consuming distractions from their careers. Like new immigrants, women are desperate to rise, and they embrace social and sexual rules that give them the freedom to focus on their professional lives.

Rosin is not saying that women are winners in a global gender war or that they are doing super simply because men are doing worse. She’s just saying women are adapting to today’s economy more flexibly and resiliently than men. There’s a lot of evidence to support her case.

A study by the National Federation of Independent Business found that small businesses owned by women outperformed male-owned small businesses during the last recession. In finance, women who switch firms are more likely to see their performance improve, whereas men are more likely to see theirs decline. There’s even evidence that women are better able to adjust to divorce. Today, more women than men see their incomes rise by 25 percent after a marital breakup.

Forty years ago, men and women adhered to certain ideologies, what it meant to be a man or a woman. Young women today, Rosin argues, are more like clean slates, having abandoned both feminist and prefeminist preconceptions. Men still adhere to the masculinity rules, which limits their vision and their movement.

If she’s right, then men will have to be less like Achilles, imposing their will on the world, and more like Odysseus, the crafty, many-sided sojourner. They’ll have to acknowledge that they are strangers in a strange land.

The war on menBy Suzanne VenkerPublished November 24, 2012FoxNews.com• The battle of the sexes is alive and well. According to Pew Research Center, the share of women ages eighteen to thirty-four that say having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in their lives rose nine percentage points since 1997 – from 28 percent to 37 percent. For men, the opposite occurred. The share voicing this opinion dropped, from 35 percent to 29 percent.Believe it or not, modern women want to get married. Trouble is, men don’t.The so-called dearth of good men (read: marriageable men) has been a hot subject in the media as of late. Much of the coverage has been in response to the fact that for the first time in history, women have become the majority of the U.S. workforce. They’re also getting most of the college degrees. The problem? This new phenomenon has changed the dance between men and women. As the author of three books on the American family and its intersection with pop culture, I’ve spent thirteen years examining social agendas as they pertain to sex, parenting, and gender roles. During this time, I’ve spoken with hundreds, if not thousands, of men and women. And in doing so, I’ve accidentally stumbled upon a subculture of men who’ve told me, in no uncertain terms, that they’re never getting married. When I ask them why, the answer is always the same.Women aren’t women anymore.To say gender relations have changed dramatically is an understatement. Ever since the sexual revolution, there has been a profound overhaul in the way men and women interact. Men haven’t changed much – they had no revolution that demanded it – but women have changed dramatically.In a nutshell, women are angry. They’re also defensive, though often unknowingly. That’s because they’ve been raised to think of men as the enemy. Armed with this new attitude, women pushed men off their pedestal (women had their own pedestal, but feminists convinced them otherwise) and climbed up to take what they were taught to believe was rightfully theirs.Now the men have nowhere to go.It is precisely this dynamic – women good/men bad – that has destroyed the relationship between the sexes. Yet somehow, men are still to blame when love goes awry. Heck, men have been to blame since feminists first took to the streets in the 1970s.But what if the dearth of good men, and ongoing battle of the sexes, is – hold on to your seats – women’s fault?You’ll never hear that in the media. All the articles and books (and television programs, for that matter) put women front and center, while men and children sit in the back seat. But after decades of browbeating the American male, men are tired. Tired of being told there’s something fundamentally wrong with them. Tired of being told that if women aren’t happy, it’s men’s fault.Contrary to what feminists like Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, say, the so-called rise of women has not threatened men. It has pissed them off. It has also undermined their ability to become self-sufficient in the hopes of someday supporting a family. Men want to love women, not compete with them. They want to provide for and protect their families – it’s in their DNA. But modern women won’t let them.It’s all so unfortunate – for women, not men. Feminism serves men very well: they can have sex at hello and even live with their girlfriends with no responsibilities whatsoever.It’s the women who lose. Not only are they saddled with the consequences of sex, by dismissing male nature they’re forever seeking a balanced life. The fact is, women need men’s linear career goals – they need men to pick up the slack at the office – in order to live the balanced life they seek.So if men today are slackers, and if they’re retreating from marriage en masse, women should look in the mirror and ask themselves what role they’ve played to bring about this transformation.Fortunately, there is good news: women have the power to turn everything around. All they have to do is surrender to their nature – their femininity – and let men surrender to theirs.If they do, marriageable men will come out of the woodwork.

"Without honor, mediocrity, corruption, and incompetence rule. Honor is based on reputation, and when people stop caring about their reputation, and shame disappears, people devolve into doing the least they can without getting into legal trouble or being fired. This leads to mediocrity, corruption, and incompetence. Navigating any business or customer service network these days, you encounter the most egregious examples of the latter. Because few potential employers check references anymore, and your reputation is unknown when you apply for the job, people have no fear of their history following them from job to job, and thus little incentive to perform their work with excellence, as opposed to mind-blowing ineptitude.

...

As society has become more complex and anonymous, and the bonds of honor have dissolved, we’ve had to rely more and more on obedience – rules and regulations — to govern people’s behavior. Because we no longer trust people to do things because they swore an oath to do so, and because concern for their honorable reputation compels them, we’ve created ever more elaborate rules and regulations to enforce ethics. Instead of feeling safe in the knowledge that a man has internalized an honor code to the extent that he may be trusted to do the right thing, even when no one is watching, now he must be constantly checked up on and videotaped. The reason the minutia of rules at your office feel infantilizing…is because they are. We must be policed by an external authority to check our behavior in the absence of honor."

More and more men are dropping out of American society. They aren't going to college, they aren't holding down jobs, they aren't getting married and they aren't becoming fathers. Current explanations typically involve blaming the men themselves: Some blame pandemic immaturity (XY-chromosomers won't "man up" and accept adult responsibility for wives and children). Other cite a "Cardboard Man" rigidity that makes men unwilling to function as househusbands or amanuenses to the female professionals increasingly favored by our deskwork economy.

Helen Smith, a practicing psychologist and blogger for PJ Media ("Dr. Helen"), offers an alternative theory: "Most men are not acting irresponsibly because they are immature or because they want to harm women; they are acting rationally in response to the lack of incentives today's society offers them to be responsible fathers, husbands and providers." They are "going Galt," as Ms. Smith puts it—imitating John Galt, the industrialist titan in Ayn Rand's 1957 novel, "Atlas Shrugged," who hides out in a gulch to defy the big-government welfare state. (Ms. Smith is a self-described libertarian and Rand fan.)Related Video

Author Helen Smith on why men are boycotting marriage, fatherhood and the American Dream.

The statistics that Ms. Smith proffers are impressively dismal. Male workforce participation has plummeted. In 1970, some 80% of working-age men were employed full-time, in contrast to the 66% employed full-time nowadays, Ms. Smith notes. Women today earn 58% of U.S. bachelor's degrees. This is partly because, as Christina Hoff Sommers wrote in her 2001 book, "The War Against Boys" (cited admiringly by Ms. Smith), the K-12 education system that feeds into college favors docile, conformist girls over aggressive, competitive boys. Colleges, as well, are riddled with feminist ideology, decimate their athletic programs in the name of Title IX and regard male students as likely rapists in their interactions with their female classmates.

Ms. Smith argues that men are simply reacting to a woman-centric culture that systemically belittles them as bumbling incompetents, denigrates their achievements and outright discriminates against them in such venues as family court. Mothers usually get custody of the children after a divorce, even if they have cheated on their husbands. Husbands sometimes end up forced to support children who aren't genetically theirs. For women, it's "my body, my choice," whereas men can be stuck writing child-support checks for 18 years even if the mother was a one-night stand who lied about using birth control. Ms. Smith blames not only feminists but passive "Uncle Tims," as she calls them, who go along with all this because, well, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, especially if she is your wife or your boss or she decides to start a Sandra Fluke-inspired boycott of you or your company.

Enlarge ImageimageimageMen on Strike

By Helen Smith(Encounter Books, 210 pages, $23.99)

This is a potentially persuasive thesis—yet Ms. Smith hasn't done much to advance it with hard evidence. Her book contains surprisingly few references to actual studies. For her assertion that more than one million American men may be currently raising another man's child unwittingly, her source is . . . a 2007 article in Men's Health magazine. A "men's' rights" blogger named Douglas Galbi is her source for a statement that about 50,000 people are behind bars on any given day for failure to pay child support. Indeed, much of Ms. Smith's material comes from the comments section on her own "Dr. Helen" blog. These commenters tend to be men who got burned in a divorce or other relationship. Divorce and discord between the sexes can be a nasty business, bringing out the worst in all concerned, including a tendency on the part of affected men to indulge in a level of victimological self-pity worthy of the most irritating feminists.

Some of Ms. Smith's commenters seem to be mostly victims of their own poor judgment—such as "Anonymous," who married a woman he thought was his "soul mate." After Anonymous lost his job, the soul mate started sleeping with another man in Anonymous's own bed, then left Anonymous and took him to the cleaners in the resultant divorce. "The adultery doesn't seem to matter to the court," he complained. While visiting his sick parents in a Louisiana hospital, Emile, a veterinarian cited in Ms. Smith's chapter on paternity fraud, engaged in oral sex with a nurse named Debra while wearing a condom—and then discovered that Debra had used the condom's contents to make him a father. Maybe Emile should have had a cup of coffee in the hospital cafeteria instead.

The real reason for such moral chaos is that we are living in a world where sexual and marital expectations have been remade by progressives male and female in the name of personal freedom, in which just about any arrangement non-judgmentally goes. No-fault divorce means exactly that. It means that adultery is on a moral par with slurping your soup, so what's wrong with an adulterous wife's getting half the marital property? The laws about which Ms. Smith complains long predate the rise of feminism. Bastardy laws that require fathers to support the children they sire out of wedlock date to Elizabethan times. Those laws and others grew out of an era in which lifelong marriage was the norm, copulation was supposed to occur within wedded bonds and nobody pretended that sex wasn't likely to lead to babies. They can work ultra-punitively in our time when few wish to accept the consequences of a failure of self-restraint.

Ms. Smith rightly protests the feminization of contemporary culture, and she rightly urges men—who, after all, built the civilization onto which feminism has latched itself—to start fighting back. But to win such battles she will need to construct arguments likely to persuade others besides the angry, alienated men who click onto her blog and mourn that their "soul mate" turned out to be not much of a mate.

Ms. Allen is the author of "The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus."

Every Sunday morning I have the pleasure of studying with two Jewish surgeons. Each week we explore the meaning of a section of the siddur (daily prayer book).We were up to the Shema, the most prominent – and fundamental – Jewish prayer. “Hear O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” Hear means more than just uttering words; it means hear the deep message and internalize it in our hearts and minds. When we say the words “God is One,” we are saying everything in the universe concurrently exists because God wills it to exist, and that life’s occurrences are a result of God’s inner-workings and underpinnings of the world.

The Shema expresses our complete devotion to God, regardless of our life circumstances. We are recognizing that everything is ultimately part of His Divine orchestration. Every time we cover our eyes and proclaim God’s unity, we are essentially stating that regardless of what is in front of my eyes today, regardless of whether life is delivering me celebration or tribulation, I cover my eyes and declare my devotion, no matter what is in front of me. It is about unconditional devotion.

John J. MillerDirector, Herbert H. Dow II Program in American JournalismHillsdale College

Football and the American Character

JOHN J. MILLER is director of the Herbert H. Dow II Program in American Journalism at Hillsdale College and national correspondent for National Review. A graduate of the University of Michigan, where he served as editor of the Michigan Review, he has also worked on the staff of The New Republic. A contributing editor of Philanthropy magazine, he writes regularly for newspapers and journals including the Detroit News, the Wall Street Journal, and National Review. He is the author of several books, including The First Assassin, a novel set during the Civil War, and most recently The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football.

The following is adapted from a luncheon speech delivered at Hillsdale College on September 9, 2013.

When we talk about football, we usually talk about our favorite teams and the games they play. The biggest ongoing story in the sport right now, however, is something else entirely. It’s not about the Bears vs. the Packers or Michigan vs. Ohio State, but rather the controversy over concussions and the long-term health effects of head injuries.

On August 29, 2013, the National Football League agreed to pay $765 million to settle a lawsuit involving more than 4,500 players and their families, who had claimed that the league covered up data on the harmful effects of concussions. Although medical research into football and long-term effects of head injuries is hardly conclusive, some data suggest a connection. A number of legal experts believe the NFL, which will generate about $10 billion in revenue this year, dodged an even bigger payout.

Football, of course, is much bigger than the NFL and its players, whose average yearly salary is nearly $2 million. Football’s ranks include about 50,000 men who play in college and four million boys who play for schools or in youth leagues whose pockets aren’t nearly so deep. A Colorado jury recently awarded $11.5 million to a boy who suffered a paralyzing injury at his high school football practice in 2008. How long will it be before school districts begin to think football isn’t worth the cost?

Earlier this year, President Obama waded into the debate. “If I had a son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football,” he said. He also called for football “to reduce some of the violence.” Others have called for a more dramatic solution: Malcolm Gladwell, the bestselling author of The Tipping Point and other books, thinks football should go the way of dogfighting. He would like to see America’s favorite sport run out of polite society.

So football’s future is uncertain. But the past may offer important lessons. After all, football’s problems today are nothing compared to what they were about a century ago: In 1905, 18 people died playing the sport. Football became embroiled in a long-running dispute over violence and safety—and it was almost banned through the efforts of Progressive-era prohibitionists. Had these enemies of football gotten their way, they might have erased one of America’s great pastimes from our culture. But they lost—and it took the efforts of Theodore Roosevelt to thwart them.

On November 18, 1876, Theodore Roosevelt, a freshman at Harvard who had just turned 18, attended his first football game. Destined for great things, he was enthusiastic about athletics in general and eager to see the new sport of football in particular. So here he was at the second game ever played between Harvard and its great rival Yale.

As Roosevelt shivered in the cold and windy fall weather, he watched a game that was quite different from the sport we know today. There were no quarterbacks or wide receivers, no first downs or forward passes. Before play began, the teams met to discuss rules. What number of men would play? What would count for a score? How long would the game last? They were like school kids today who have to set up boundaries, choose between a game of touch or tackle, and decide how to count blitzes.

Harvard’s veterans agreed to a couple of suggestions proposed by Yale. The first would carry a lasting legacy: Rather than playing with 15 men to a side, as was the current custom, the teams would play with eleven men. So this was the first football game to feature eleven players on the field per team.

The second suggestion would not shape the sport’s future, but it would affect the game that afternoon: Touchdowns would not count for points. Only goals—balls sailed over a rope tied between two poles—kicked after touchdowns or kicked from the field during play would contribute to the score.

In the first half, Harvard scored a touchdown but missed the kick. By the rules of the day, this meant that Harvard earned no points. At halftime, the game was a scoreless tie.

After the break, Yale pushed into Harvard territory and a lanky freshman named Walter Camp tried to shovel the ball to a teammate. It was a poor lateral pass that hit the ground and bounced upward, taking one of those funny hops that can befuddle even skilled players. In a split second, Oliver Thompson decided to take a chance on a kick from about 35 yards away and at a wide angle. The ball soared into the air, over the rope and through the uprights, giving Yale a lead of 1-0. No more points were scored that afternoon.

In a letter to his mother the next day, Roosevelt gave voice to the frustration that so often accompanies defeat in sports. “I am sorry to say we were beaten,” he wrote, “principally because our opponents played very foul.”

More about Teddy Roosevelt and what he did for football in a moment. But first, let me discuss briefly why football matters.

Love for a college football team, whether it’s the Texas Longhorns or the Hillsdale Chargers, is almost tribal. In some cases the affiliation is practically inherited, in others chosen. Whatever the origin, football has the power to form lifelong loyalties and passions and has supplanted baseball as America’s favorite pastime. Yet it almost died 100 years ago. Over the course of an ordinary football season in those days, a dozen or more people would die playing it, and many more suffered serious injuries. A lot of the casualties were kids in sandlot games, but big-time college teams also paid a price.

Football isn’t a contact sport—it’s a collision sport that has always prized size, strength, and power. This was especially true in its early years, when even the era of leatherheads lay in the future: Nobody wore helmets, facemasks, or shoulder pads. During the frequent pileups, hidden from the view of referees, players would wrestle for advantage by throwing punches and jabbing elbows. The most unsporting participants would even try to gouge their opponents’ eyes.

The deaths were the worst. They were not freak accidents as much as the inevitable toll of a violent game. And they horrified a group of activists who crusaded against football itself—wanting not merely to remove violence from the sport, but to ban the sport altogether. At the dawn of the Progressive era, the social and political movement to prohibit football became a major cause.

The New York Evening Post attacked the sport, as did The Nation, an influential magazine of news and opinion. The latter worried that colleges were becoming “huge training grounds for young gladiators, around whom as many spectators roar as roared in the [Roman] amphitheatre.” The New York Times bemoaned football’s tendency toward “mayhem and homicide.” Two weeks later, the Times ran a new editorial entitled “Two Curable Evils.” The first evil it addressed was lynching. The second was football.

The main figure in this movement to ban football was Charles W. Eliot, the president of Harvard and probably the single most important person in the history of higher education in the United States. Indeed, Eliot hated team sports in general because competition motivated players to conduct themselves in ways he considered unbecoming of gentlemen. If baseball and football were honorable pastimes, he reasoned, why did they require umpires and referees? “A game that needs to be watched is not fit for genuine sportsmen,” he once said. For Eliot, a pitcher who threw a curve ball was engaging in an act of treachery. But football distressed him even more. Most of all, he despised its violence. Time and again, he condemned the game as “evil.”

One of Eliot’s main adversaries in the battle over football was Walter Camp, one of the players in the game Teddy Roosevelt watched in 1876. A decent player, Camp made his real mark on football as a coach and a rules-maker. Indeed, he is the closest thing there is to football’s founding father.

In the rivalry between Eliot and Camp, we see one of the ongoing controversies in American politics at its outset—the conflict between regulators bent on the dream of a world without risk, and those who resist such an agenda in the name of freedom and responsibility. Eliot and other Progressives identified a genuine problem with football, but their solution was radical. They wanted to regulate football out of existence because they believed that its participants were not capable of making their own judgments in terms of costs and benefits. In their higher wisdom, these elites would ban the sport for all.

Into this struggle stepped Theodore Roosevelt. As a boy, he had suffered from chronic asthma to the point that relatives wondered if he would survive childhood. His mother and father tried everything to improve his health, even resorting to quack cures such as having him smoke cigars. Ultimately they concluded that he simply would have to overcome the disease. They encouraged him to go to a gym, and he worked out daily. The asthma would stay with Roosevelt for years, but by the time he was an adult, it was largely gone. For Roosevelt, the lesson was that a commitment to physical fitness could take a scrawny boy and turn him into a vigorous young man.

This experience was deeply connected to Roosevelt’s love of football. He remained a fan as he graduated from Harvard, entered politics, ranched out west, and became an increasingly visible public figure.

In 1895, shortly before he became president of the New York City police commission, he wrote a letter to Walter Camp that read as follows:

I am very glad to have a chance of expressing to you the obligation which I feel all Americans are under to you for your championship of athletics. The man on the farm and in the workshop here, as in other countries, is apt to get enough physical work; but we were tending steadily in America to produce . . . sedentary classes . . . and from this the athletic spirit has saved us. Of all games I personally like foot ball the best, and I would rather see my boys play it than see them play any other. I have no patience with the people who declaim against it because it necessitates rough play and occasional injuries. The rough play, if confined within manly and honorable limits, is an advantage. It is a good thing to have the personal contact about which the New York Evening Post snarls so much, and no fellow is worth his salt if he minds an occasional bruise or cut. Being near-sighted I was not able to play foot ball in college, and I never cared for rowing or base ball, so that I did all my work in boxing and wrestling. They are both good exercises, but they are not up to foot ball . . . .

I am utterly disgusted with the attitude of President Eliot and the Harvard faculty about foot ball . . . .

I do not give a snap for a good man who can’t fight and hold his own in the world. A citizen has got to be decent of course. That is the first requisite; but the second, and just as important, is that he shall be efficient, and he can’t be efficient unless he is manly. Nothing has impressed me more in meeting college graduates during the fifteen years I have been out of college than the fact that on the average the men who have counted most have been those who had sound bodies.

As this letter indicates, Roosevelt saw football as more than a diversion. He saw it as a positive social good. When he was recruiting the Rough Riders in 1898, he went out of his way to select men who had played football. The Duke of Wellington reportedly once said, “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” Roosevelt never said anything similar about football fields and the Battle of San Juan Hill, but when he emerged from the Spanish-American War as a national hero—and as someone talked about as being of presidential timber—he knew how much he owed not just to the Rough Riders, but to the culture of manliness and risk-taking that had shaped them.

Like Roosevelt, our society values sports, though we don’t always think about why—or why we should. My kids have played football, baseball, hockey, soccer, and lacrosse. As a family, we’re fairly sports-oriented. It has forced me to think about a question that a lot of parents probably ask at one time or another: Why do we want our kids to participate in athletics?

Many parents will point to the obvious fact that sports are good for health and fitness. They’ll also discuss the intangible benefits in terms of character building—sports teach kids to get up after falling down, to play through pain, to deal with failure, to work with teammates, to take direction from coaches, and so on.

It turns out that there really is something to all of this. Empirical research shows that kids who play sports stay in school longer. As adults, they vote more often and earn more money. Explaining why this is true is trickier, but it probably has something to do with developing a competitive instinct and a desire for achievement.

Roosevelt was surely correct in believing that sports influence the character of a nation. Americans are much more likely than Europeans to play sports. We’re also more likely to attribute economic success to hard work, as opposed to luck. It may be that sports are a manifestation—or possibly even a source—of American exceptionalism.

When Roosevelt ascended to the presidency, football remained controversial and Harvard’s Eliot continued his crusade for prohibition. In 1905, Roosevelt was persuaded to act. He invited Walter Camp of Yale to the White House, along with the coaches of Harvard and Princeton. These were the three most important football teams in the country. “Football is on trial,” said Roosevelt. “Because I believe in the game, I want to do all I can to save it.” He encouraged the coaches to eliminate brutality, and they promised that they would.

Whether they meant what they said is another matter. Walter Camp didn’t see anything wrong with the way football was played. Harvard’s coach, however, was a young man named Bill Reid. He took Roosevelt more seriously, because he took the threat to football more seriously. Indeed, within weeks of meeting with Roosevelt, he came to fear that Eliot was on the verge of success in having Harvard drop the sport, which would have encouraged other schools to do the same.

At the end of the 1905 season, therefore, Reid plotted with a group of reform-minded colleges to form an organization that today we know as the NCAA and to approve a set of sweeping rules changes to reduce football’s violence. In committee meetings, Reid outmaneuvered Camp while receiving critical behind-the-scenes support from Roosevelt.

As a result, football experienced an extreme makeover: The yardage necessary for a first down increased from five to ten. Rules-makers also created a neutral zone at the line of scrimmage, limited the number of players who could line up in the backfield, made the personal foul a heavily penalized infraction, and banned the tossing of ballcarriers.

These were important revisions, and each was approved with an eye toward improving the safety of players. Yet the change that would transform the sport the most was the introduction of the forward pass. Up to this point, football was a game of running and kicking, not throwing. There were quarterbacks but not wide receivers. It took a few years to get the rule right—footballs needed to evolve away from their watermelon-like shape and become more aerodynamic, and coaches and players had to figure out how to take advantage of this new offensive tool. But on November 1, 1913, football moved irreversibly into the modern era.

Army was one of the best teams in the country, a national championship contender. It was scheduled to play a game against a little-known Catholic school from the Midwest. The headline in the New York Times that morning read: “Army Wants Big Score.” The little-known Catholic school was Notre Dame. Knute Rockne and his teammates launched football’s first true air war, throwing again and again for receptions and touchdowns. And they won, 35-14. Gushed the New York Times:

"The Westerners flashed the most sensational football that has been seen in the East this year. The Army players were hopelessly confused and chagrined before Notre Dame’s great playing, and their style of old-fashioned close line-smashing play was no match for the spectacular and highly perfected attack of the Indiana collegians."

A West Point cadet named Dwight Eisenhower watched from the sidelines. He was on Army’s team but didn’t play due to injury. “Everything has gone wrong,” he wrote to his girlfriend. “The football team . . . got beaten most gloriously by Notre Dame.”

With that game, football’s long first chapter came to a close. It had reduced the problem of violence, and the game that we enjoy today was born.

The example of Roosevelt shows that a skillful leader can use a light touch to solve a vexing problem. As a general rule, of course, we don’t want politicians interfering with our sports. The only thing that could make the BCS system worse is congressional involvement.

At the same time, our political leaders help to shape our culture and our expectations. They can promise a world without risk, or they can send a different message. As a father myself, I can sympathize with President Obama’s cautious statements about football. At the same time, his comments would have benefited from some context: Gregg Easterbrook, who writes a football column for ESPN, has pointed out that a teen who drives a car for an hour has about a one in a million chance of dying—compared to a one in six million chance for a teen who spends an hour practicing football.

Americans are a self-governing people. We can make our own judgments about whether to drive or play football—and when we make these choices, we can make them in recognition of the fact that although sports can be dangerous, they’re also good for us. They not only make us distinctively American, they make us better Americans.